


Hope Dies Last

by kpkndy



Series: a good man is hard to find [3]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Heavy Angst, Hope vs. Despair, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mortality, Soldier Enhancement Program, Suffering, Violence, how we were, r76 week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-15
Updated: 2017-01-15
Packaged: 2018-09-17 13:30:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9326852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kpkndy/pseuds/kpkndy
Summary: Jack chooses to lean on a falling man.





	

**Author's Note:**

> an entry for r76 week that's been in the works a while. as always, for CC, my own true love lost at sea. 
> 
> warnings for vomiting, violence and frequent mentions of death.
> 
> also make sure to check out Half Empty: more glorious and painful reaper76 for the masses:  
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/9327296

Seven weeks and Gabe thought the kid would get used to it.

 

That his nose would learn to seal itself when he throws himself for refuge into dark, muddy waters. His eyes would develop membranes to become impenetrable to dust, or gunpowder –and that his hands would grow their own gloves: invisible, tough, and permanent.

 

Seven weeks – _ two  _ shots, that’s it, and Jack Morrison is on his goddamn deathbed.

 

The joke is on Gabe and he knows it. He really thought the kid was made of stronger materials. That he could –could fight it, or something. But it’s too late on the firth morning of the seventh week, when a gray body fails to stir at the keening bell for breakfast.

 

And it was too late two weeks ago, when Jack all but collapsed in a maintenance corridor, and too late when he walked through the door to Gabe’s room those seven weeks ago with a bag slung over his bony shoulder, and too late when Jack put pen to paper to sign up to save the world.

 

So when Gabe sees him, frozen on his side, breaths shallow and ghost-like, colour and life scarce to none in his features, he knows there’s nothing he can do for the kid now. Those covers will becoming his winding sheets and the mattress his cooling board, and Gabe is mostly remorseless to kick the bedframe hard.

 

“Get up.” He says. But Jack doesn’t get up.

 

His head turns ever-so-slightly onto it’s side and Gabe can see blond, downy hair covering the pillow in clumps. That’s what gets Gabe’s attention. Not the stink of death on him, or the cold, gray look of the boy. But blond –a natural blond.

 

He’s seen four other men die in this bed the same way. None of them were blond.

 

Outside, a smattering of distant conversation distracts Gabe but for a second, but when he looks back down at the bed, the kid is in the same place, drowning in the sheets, fading into the yellowing calico. Gabe has been here before, he knows, and he’ll be again. But to see it so plainly --his future, for however long he lives; it stirs him in a way he hasn’t been stirred before.    
  
God, he’s not upset, but  _ cursed _ .    
  
The kid’s death feels so pitiful and avoidable that he feels his forearm tense with the desire to climb on the mattress pad and break Jack’s arm.    
  
Instead, he repeats himself. “Get up.” He says, because he’s sick to death of this routine. Dies, died, will die. This event was set in motion before they even met, and Gabe sort of wishes if the kid was going to do this, he’d get it over with, and not drag it out with these pained little breaths like he’s trying to cling to life.    
  
Gabe counts to three, tiredly, and then kicks the bed again, hearing the frame shake, watching the body as it rocks with twinned motion. The body --jesus, already. His prognosis changes none when the kid does react --barely, a harrowing breath turning to a weak little cough into the pillow. Gaudy red blooms like poppies on the pillowcase, but it’s enough. It’s life.    
  
The kid’s eyes make some attempt at opening, but get no further than a sliver of blue as tiny and essential as the blade of a knife. It looks like he’s trying to find Gabe, but struggles, despite his shadow being cast over Jack like a veil of darkness. And it’s so --so pathetic to witness: that the kid is present and holding to life by the tips of his fingers; Gabe has to look away.    
  
That Jack has made it this far only to die is too personal. Too cruel. One more look down at the kid and Gabe wonders, truly, if killing him now would be a mercy.    
  
“Shit,” He cusses, and walks that thought to the door when it hits him --walks himself to the door, because he thinks if he’s in that room for a second more he really will do it. His hands are tense and his elbows feel tight, because God knows it would be  _ easy _ . The state that kid is in right now, it would be like --like--...   
  
He stands at the threshold of the door and wonders what difference it would make. That kid wanted this --chose it. Signed on and gave his life to it. Let him have it, Gabe thinks, witheringly. The endgame is boring, and he’s tired.   
  
So he leaves the body where it is, and leaves the door open. Jack can either follow him, or die.    
  
But right now, Gabe wants to eat.    
  
-   
  
That which doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.    
  
But in 87% of trials, it kills you.    
  
-   
  
The absentees are counted, even if nobody says anything.    
  
Gabe knows that Morrison is like a bright red poppy pinned to his lapel, and everybody notices the lack of colour at breakfast --and at lunch, and at dinner. Every look that Gabe sees that day is one he has seen before, and it penetrates in the same way a new wound over a scar does, even if it remains unspoken.    
  
Why would they speak of those who go under? Most are just strangers, and what the hell does Gabe have to say for them? There is an intimacy to it all that feels strange when light is shed upon it. That death should be so familiar with the unfamiliar --and all Gabe wants is to eat his lunch in peace.   
  
“You ever feel cursed?” He asks, tiredly. No one wants to reply.    
  
He finishes eating almost immediately, hunger an almost impossibility to him, but remains seated for all of lunch, pushing the colourless food around his plate.    
  
It seems a better fate than facing the body in the room.    
  
-   
  
Gabe can sleep through a firefight. He’s learned to turn his senses away from the distant rattle of gunfire. He can’t even count the times he’s passed into sleep bleeding into the sheets, propped up, a hand holding his skin together.    
  
So why is he sleepless in a dark, silent room?    
  
The distant hum of a generator doesn’t register to him, nor does any chill. God knows he has slept through worse a million times --so why are Gabe’s eyes wide open in the darkness?    
  
(He knows. Of course he knows.    
  
The kid is still breathing just to spite him, reeking of death. Life clings to him like a disease and Gabe is there, banging his head against his bedframe and praying Jack to do him one last mercy and just die already. )   
  
You know what’s worse? He does.    
  
For a second, at least. The haunting timbre of these tiny, tiny breaths halt so suddenly, and Gabe watches the very slight movement of the kid’s chest cease utterly, paralysed by the sight of it. He’s seen it before, he knows, but does that make it any less devastating?    
  
Jack’s eyes are closed and his sheets are tacky with sweat and blood, hair at rest all over him like a sheet of mildew. Without expression, the kid looks so --so young, his face lineless and grey, but at peace. He’s facing ahead, and Gabe wonders if he’s the last thing the kid ever saw. You don’t forget the face of somebody who was your last hope.    
  
Gabe doesn’t realise he’s holding his breath at the sight of the slaughtered youth until the body twists, ever-so-slightly, and a hollow little cough come out of the kid’s mouth, spattering fresh blood on the pillow. Jack’s head falls lax against it and the plasma smears his cheeky a strange yellow colour, but he continues to breathe.    
  
Come morning, he still clings to life.    
  
And Gabe hasn’t slept a minute.    
  
-   
  
Two men go in one hour that morning.    
  
Braidwood, down the hall, who was new, and who Gabe feels no particular remorse for. And Elowitz, who had been as long as Gabe --maybe more. Who’d shown no signs of illness or weakness. Privately, Gabe had looked to him for reassurance. They were the lucky ones, he thought. The ones they couldn’t break.    
  
But Elowitz dies and the kid lives.    
  
Elowitz dies and Gabe doesn’t sleep, and on the coldest morning of all, he walks out of the door to the wake that will be breakfast when he hears it.    
  
A whisper. An electrical fault.    
  
The dead.    
  
Gabe thinks he’s lost his goddamned mind until he turns around, in the door to the room, seeing the kid with his eyes as open as they’ve been in a week. In a near-imperceptible voice that trembles in the open air, he hears it again, and doesn’t dare believe the word he sees those blue lips make.    
  
‘Water’.    
  
See, Gabe’s inherently a hypocrite.    
  
For wanting to make it all better --for signing up here, even. Yet, all the other men that have died in the bed next to him have gone without a single thought, overnight, or in the moments Gabe wasn’t looking. He has done no good for all of his intentions, and now, of all times, when he has finally learned to make peace with death does the opportunity present itself.   
  
The dry, blue lips of the body make the shape again, soundlessly.    
  
And Gabe nods.    
  
He’s not sure if he runs or walks. He thinks every man that passes him in the hall is Jack. The green light of commissary blinks distantly, still, and he thinks that the kid is saved --but  _ saved _ , for Chrissakes, the moment a cup of water is in his hand.    
  
But the sight he comes back to is far from salvation.    
  
Gabe remembers the word, and the life that word sprang from, but the well is dry. He stands in the door and bares witness alone to the lax, cooling body that spills from the bed, one arm reaching out towards the door as if in expectation --as if inwaiting. The worst part of it all is that he looks no different to Gabe’s helpless sight.    
  
All but for the breathing.    
  
Heat overcomes his body, the guilt of it all burning him until it turns to fury. Gabe never asked for any of this. Not for this kid or any of the souls that came before him --too idealistic and helpless and weak, and he couldn’t save them, he can’t save them, he can’t--   
  
Tossing the water aside, Gabe takes a few furious steps forward and reaches out, grabbing the bare shoulder of the body and shaking, hard.    
  
“Hey.” Gabe coughs out, weakly, unready to refuse this kid’s fate. “Hey!” He shakes hard and cruelly, despite how cold the kid feels and how desperately he wants to let go.    
  
Amazingly, the body draws in air.    
  
Amazingly, he cries out.    
  
The sound is so startling that Gabe snaps back in horror, withdrawing from the marble-heavy touch of the body, and watching as the weight sinks back into the sheets that hold it, like a bag full of God. There’s the slightest, weakest timbre coming from the kid’s mouth, and jesus, it’s enough.    
  
He draws back towards the body and snakes a hand under the back of the man’s slick, cooling neck to prop his head up ever-so-slightly, sick with apprehension, scanning the gray, passive face for any further signs of life. Gabe demands some. This terrible suspense this kid has kept him locked in has to end, one way or another, and for the first time since his own survival, crawling out of it on his hands and knees like some original sin, he feels hope, again.    
  
Trembling, he leans to prop the kid up, relieved by the very slight breath of relief he hears from the body. There’s no way to tell if it’s helping, or if this is exhausting the last few breaths from the boy, but what else is there to do? Jack’s skin is slick with sweat and hard from bedsores from where he has been lying, useless and disposed of. Was he waiting? Was he lying there in the dark waiting for Gabe --for an absolution that would never come?    
  
It seems impossible that the kid’s mouth tries to move again, hissing out a tiny, dry whisper, making another last plea. His eyes open again, so slightly, only revealing the faintest hint of a pupil that’s shrunken and weak and so black that no sky dare squeal past it, and Gabe stares right back, paralysed, unable to look away.    
  
“Water.” He says, echoing the kid, waiting for a sign like he’s doing the right thing. Looking over his shoulder, he sees the cup, empty, on it’s side, and a shirt soaked on the floor. He looks back at the kid, and he looks so weak, so close to death, nodding ever-so-slightly. “Okay.” Gabe says, his breath sort of stolen. “Okay.”    
  
One refilled from the ensuite basin, Gabe returns to his bedside with shaking hands, crouching to reposition Jack’s head. The man is still so cold and fragile that he wonders if the kid will cut his hands on Gabe’s edges. If he is too sharp.    
  
But the kid doesn’t bleed any. With the cup to his lips, he takes passively with his eyes still closed. The sharp adam’s apple of his neck seems to undulate, and it’s the only sign Gabe is ever given that it’s of any benefit to the dying man. Most of it washes down the side of his face and dampens the pillow beneath him, washing some of the drying blood from Jack’s cheek.    
  
In a minute, it’s empty, and Gabe watches the kid’s closed, unresponsive face as a sign of what to do next. It’s impossible to tell if he’s done enough, or anything at all, and Jack gives no word of guidance either way, falling limp back into rest again, warmer, but still weak, in one of Gabe’s hands.    
  
God, then it’s over, and Gabe is sat on the floor of his room next to a dying man, staring at the wall and wondering why, of all the men that died in this bed, this one has the audacity to resist.    
  
The inevitable is prolonged, he sighs, dropping his head back against the bed.    
  
But it’s still the inevitable.    
  
-   
  
As it turns out, Gabe’s hypocrisy really doesn’t know any bounds.    
  
And Jack Morrison’s endurance knows nought, either.    
  
Even if he never stirs from bed, or says another word, his eyes are ever-so-slightly open both times Gabe returns from a meal. It’s not clear if it’s a good or a bad sign, but it’s something. Vacant blue eyes stare up at the ceiling without distraction, and there’s no way to tell if the kid is counting the holes there or just spun out, clinging on without any focused consciousness.    
  
Gabe doesn’t care to find out. Twice more, he brings the kid water, because at least he’s doing something. And twice more, the kid seems to drink.    
  
The last time is just before lights out, and while the room is still lit he props the kid’s head up again and brings the cup towards him. The body feels less of the grave, he thinks --or maybe it’s just the poisonous sting of hope. Not once has Gabe ever seen somebody fight it. Much less recover.    
  
Hell, the first boy that Gabe was roomed with died at the first sign of trouble. The physical sickness and vomiting had preoccupied both of them. It was only by the evening of the next day that Gabe was weak and the other boy was dead, and that was perhaps the most devastating death of them all.    
  
Not because of how it was, because it was mercifully quick --but because of who. Because they had been seven weeks in, then, too, drafted in a unit of sixty men for the first phase who all thought they’d make it when only twenty-six even made it to phase two.    
  
And now, only twelve of those number still live, and Gabe still feels the cold of that boy’s body in Jack’s bed because he had learned his name. Because, even in the smallest capacity, Gabe had known him. Had hoped for him, and then watched him die, nameless and moneyless, and after the next boy died Gabe stopped asking for names, and places.    
  
Lord knows the only reason he knows Jack’s name is that it’s what he’s heard the others call him. He never asked. He never wanted to.    
  
Fool him once, right?    
  
Yet, there he is, fooled again, kneeling at the kid’s bedside and watching him cough up rosy water. Pain fleets across the kid’s face, and Gabe wonders how he even found himself here, staring at the pale advance of death’s flag on the features of the boy and wondering if the pain is a good sign, or one for the worse.    
  
Withdrawing the cup, he thumps the kid’s chest as the only help he can offer. Again, it’s not clear how much good it really does, but Jack is still sort of breathing, at least. His chest settles after a few seconds and any tension or resistance in his body seems to fail. Lax against Gabe, his eyelash-less eyes flutter to opening ever-so-slightly, and without even looking at the other man, the kid’s mouth makes a new word.    
  
‘Thanks’.    
  
It takes Gabe aback to hear it, or see it. He isn’t sure which sense registers it first. It doesn’t matter.    
  
With his gentlest motion, he lets the kid back down onto his dirty pillow and frees his hand. The lights are going to cut, soon. In the last few minutes or so of light, Gabe gets another quick glance at the kid just to see if he’s still at some part there, and notes the sweat that’s discolouring the sheets, and the smattering of livid blood on older stains.    
  
There’s more to do, he knows. Even if --even if the kid does die, after all of this, Gabe could at least do him the service of clean sheets to be buried in. To wipe down the kid’s face before goes to sleep so the sight in the dark is a little more bearable. So he can have the grace of sleep.    
  
But he doesn’t, in the end. Doesn’t move from where he’s sat on the floor, against the bed, until the lights go out and he’s in a sudden darkness.    
  
Maybe it’s just that he’s facing away or maybe the cumulative exhaustion finally claims him, but Gabe does sleep, at long last --carried into the darkness by the peace of another’s breathing.    
  
-   
  
Gabe is shook awake into the dark room. Not by the bell for breakfast, but by an most imperceptible sensation.    
  
A fingertip, no more or less, on the back of his neck.    
  
And Gabe startles into action like a cut snake, only to find no foe or threat alike, but the body. The moved body, turned awkwardly on it’s front, with a trembling, outstretched arm. Even like this, Gabe can see him in a horrible clarity, the kid’s mouth sort of open, a tiny, rasping voice trying to worm it’s way out of a pinhead throat.   
  
To save time, Gabe reaches by the discarded cup at rest on the floor by the bed and brings it to the kid’s line of sight. “Water?” He asks, in a quiet voice.    
  
But not water.    
  
The kid’s other hand is trapped beneath his stomach, and he turns almost to emphasis where his palm is, flat under his abdomen. His mouth makes the ‘f’ shape in the dark and he needs no more.    
  
“Food?” Gabe reads, frowning. In the context of it all, it makes sense. The kid has been bed-ridden with weakness --too sick to get to breakfast or even to a bathroom. In a way, it’s sort of comforting, because Gabe knows the scent of death so well, and it’s nowhere on Jack’s body anymore. There’s desperation and sweat and blood and piss thick on him and it reeks of humanity. Of life.    
  
The kid looks dangerously unresponsive again, so he shakes him with a rough hand on the shoulder, withdrawing suddenly when those eyes crack open slightly again to accompany a noise of pain. Gabe leans back, witnessing it, jamming his fists by his sides and swallowing. “Is that --you’re hungry?”    
  
Exhaling dryly, the kid looks like he’s nodding. So, he is.    
  
Gabe doesn’t even get a moment of pride to have worked it out before he looks drearily around the room again. It’s thick with darkness. The corridor is the same. Commissary is shut. The cafeteria is shut, and there’s no single scrap of food in any one of the rooms in the wing.    
  
He realises it with a cold, cruel twist in his gut --that this time things are different, and he has a chance to do something but can’t. He can’t, and it fills him with a cold, empty heaviness that drags him to sink even deeper onto the cold floor.    
  
“I --it’s the middle of the night.” Gabe whispers, gruffly. He can’t look at the kid as he speaks. He doesn’t want to be the face of Jack’s last goddamn hope.    
  
It looks like it’s too late when the kid coughs out another pained, weak noise, his limp, outstretched hand trembling slightly like he’s still trying to reach Gabe. But he’s reached him, alright. He’s done everything he can, and he’s still inches short, trapped in his sheets and helpless.    
  
Gabe wants to turn away, but is nailed to the spot, swallowing thickly, looking at the body to try and tell if he’ll last until morning. God knows that Jack has beaten the odds to get this far --to still be holding on, despite it all, and if there’s any justice left in the universe then the kid will live.    
  
But there is no justice, and Gabe has nothing but faith --a last straw of it that hasn’t been wrenched from him, when he reaches out to squeeze the kid’s wrist. Just to let him know somebody else is there.    
  
“It’ll be morning soon.” He says, in the dark, with no clue if Jack can even hear him. “Just last ‘til then.” The words aren’t for Jack, though. Gabe remains slumped against the bed, still holding on to the kid’s wrist as he feels the exhaustion hit him again. “Just --just ‘til then.”    
  
He tries to keep himself awake and anchored to the kid’s breathing, but it’s too slight, and there’s nothing to grasp too.    
  
And all of a sudden the kid is awake and alone in the dark.    
  
-   
  
The breakfast bell is what wakes him.    
  
There is no moment of haziness. The moment he hears it, clarity fills him, and Gabe is bolt upright and alert, turning immediately to the body behind him.    
  
There’s no apprehension to it anymore. No horror, nor kindness. Gabe grabs the kid’s shoulder, feeling it cold beneath his hand. He swallows and shakes the body, his body calm with tension, unable to move or think or so a damn thing until he sees this through. Until he sees the kid open his eyes, or --or something.    
  
“Hey.” Gabe coughs out, angrily, shaking harder when the kid fails to respond. When he feels marble-heavy and bereft. “Hey!” He’s shouting, now, demanding that the kid live. Demanding that he respond in the least --that he just open his damn eyes.    
  
He does. Barely a vapour, but he does, and suddenly Gabe doesn’t mind being the face of the kid’s last hope --hell, he’d sell his soul to keep on seeing the tiniest sliver of black and sweet, beauty blue as those eyes struggle to find focus.    
  
Gabe can’t help it at all, and hears himself let out a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding, transforming into into a disbelieving laugh. There’s pain, there, in the dizzy eyes, but it’s fixable. It is.    
  
Swallowing, the hand on the kid’s face tightens a little, and he says, “Hold on.” But he doesn’t move, at first. Reluctant to let go. Still afraid that Jack has lasted this long --longer than any other only to lose him at any minute that his back is turned.    
  
It’s too late for that sort of cowardice. Gabe withdraws as gently as he can and forces himself to go. He crawls out of his own accord --nobody rolls back that stone for him.    
  
The halls are busy. Gabe swims upstream as best he can --as fast, squeezing through the wall of arms and down narrow, winding staircases that threaten to close on him and keep him there. The feeling of the kid’s fingers, reaching out hopelessly is like the stone in his shoe, and even with the weight of it, he’s still running.    
  
The cafeteria is busy when he hurries through the door, sprinting towards the line and sharply elbowing another dead-eyed recruit who’s about to have his tray filled, snatching it out of his hands brusquely.    
  
A protest nearly happens, when the man says, “Hey--”   
  
“Fuck off!” Gabe is shouting, again, suddenly. The tray is filled in what feels like slow-motion, and the moment it’s done, he forces himself back out of the line and towards the door, deaf to the complaints of those behind him. It’s like tunnel-vision. The smell and heat of the food doesn’t even register to his own sense, tired and hungry as they are.    
  
Now practically running, he gets his shoulder through the door before he feels himself heaved back. He brings the tray up to his chest in preparation for a fight with whoever he pissed off badly in the breakfast line --but that’s not who he’s confronted with.    
  
“Take a seat, soldier.” He’s told, by a particularly mean-looking man standing guard on the door. “You know the rules. Food here or none at all.”    
  
The corridor beyond is so clear of traffic that Gabe considers running. Every second that ticks by connects to his bones and his ire and he despises all the time that it takes for him to say, “A kid’s starving to death.”    
  
He goes for the door again with some kind of renewed vigour, like his own desire to save should somehow bend the iron rules of this place. Like anybody else should care for the kid that’s already cooling in the bed besides his, nameless and meaningless. But it does nothing, and he’s grabbed harder this time, his arm twisted, caught in a sudden commotion that sees the tray clatter to the floor in a display more terrible to Gabe than the fall of Rome.    
  
Fighting, hissing at them in anger, he finds his voice again, “Are you just --just gonna let him starve?!”    
  
For that, he gets to meet the wall in a hard, cruel motion that has him biting his own tongue. The motion winds him despite how he jerks back violently, trying to break his assailant’s posture. But there are two of them and Gabe is sick with worry and hasn’t slept right in days, so he can do nought but struggle, cursing violently at them.    
  
“Settle down.” he hears one of them say, sweetly. “Or we can give you a room all to yourself.”    
  
Gabe spits over his shoulder and bucks backwards in a desperate attempt at freedom. “Get off of me!” He roars. “He’s --he’s going to--”   
  
He’s forced against the wall again, harder this time, enough to make him feel dizzy and suddenly sick. The taste of blood is hot in his mouth. “Kid’s got legs, soldier.”    
  
The plaster is dry and rough against the skin of his face, scraping hard at his cheekbone. Gabe hisses into it furiously. They don’t have time for this. They don’t have any time at all, and that kid is going to die in his bed after fighting to his last for days --going to drop dead over something so fucking preventable.    
  
Coughing out, Gabe twists and snarls at them, “That kid’s gonna  _ die _ \--”   
  
He is met with unnerving ease. “Not your concern.”    
  
“The hell it isn’t!” Hot with righteous anger, his voice cracks in desperation. “These kids are dropping like flies--”   
  
There is a moment of confusion before he feels the arm behind his back twist further, close to breaking, and he cries out. He hears somebody says, “Get him out of here.” and then panic and dread rise in equal amounts to suffocate him.    
  
The sharp breath he takes in must register to paic to them, and the voice closest to his ear sounds full of arrogance when he hears, “Think this one needs to cool off a bit.”    
  
But they don’t have a bit. God, they’re already on borrowed time and Gabe’s pride barely allows him to straighten, suddenly, the resistance in his body disappearing in a single second. “No --no, don’t--”   
  
“Troublemakers have to be dealt with.” The voice says, again, and Gabe tries to lock himself onto the spot. Deference is not in his nature, but right now he’d probably drop to his goddamn hands and knees to pray for salvation if there was a chance it’d work.    
  
Instead, he finds his words coming a mile a minute, pleading and insistent. “There’s no trouble --you don’t --you have to let go of me--” There’s no resistance in his posture, and it’s a million times worse when his arm is jerked back enough that the pain sets his entire shoulder on fire. “You can’t just leave him--”   
  
“If he’s unsuitable for the program, that’s his problem.” One of them says, tiredly, tugging Gabe backwards. “And if you’re making trouble, you’re unsuitable, too.”    
  
For some reason, Elowitz’s face springs vividly to life in Gabe’s mind. How skinny the kid had been when he started, and how much hope he’d had. How much commitment to some pipe dream and they pumped him full of poison and let him die because he couldn’t handle it. Just like all those other kids who let themselves dream.    
  
Unsuitable, he thinks, is just another word for expendable. Ready to be put down or left to die like an animal, and if the common horror of those men wasting away in their vomit-soaked sheets does nothing for these men, Gabe doesn’t think they’ll grant him any hesitation or mercy if he keeps up any resistance.    
  
Forced to his knees by it all, Gabe grinds out some pitiful words, “I’m --I’ll cooperate.”    
  
He hears somebody chuckle, slightly, and bites the inside of his cheek to stop the protest that wants to worm it’s treacherous way up his throat. “Oh, it’s a little late for that, soldier.”    
  
What a mystery this world is, Gabe thinks, then. That he’ll get his stripes and ribbons for all the men he puts in the ground, but if he tries to pull a man out of their grave he might just fall in. It’s not fear that makes him talk when he does, the words sounding so suddenly calm --but resignation.    
  
“You’ve made your point.” Gabe hears himself say. “You really want the trouble of hauling my ass out of here and filling out the paperwork?”    
  
There’s a second --but a second, of hesitation, before he feels a hard kick to the back of the knee that brings him to the surly ground. “I don’t know.” The man at his back says. “I sure don’t feel like regretting my largesse today.”    
  
Gabe remains with his head hung, trying to seem as submissive as possible. He takes a breath and braces himself. He feels the kick before it even happens, knocking him from his knees to a fetal position. He feels another in his back, knocking every bit of breath from him, before coming to take whatever he wasn’t aware he had left.    
  
Already weak, he has no resistance to dare give when a hand tugs on his collar, pulling up, on to kick him back hard enough that he tastes more blood, rosy in his mouth, coming from his nose. It becomes indistinct after the first few merciless strikes, and then all he can really feel is the heat of inflammation rising in his body and the heavy, heavy eyes of every other surviving man seated or standing in the cafeteria.    
  
Nobody protests. Nobody goes to say a damn thing, and Gabe thinks if he were found dead in his own sheets in the morning, the bottom wouldn’t fall out of any of their lives.    
  
Tugged up once more, Gabe finds the face of one of his assailants, pale and solemn but live with pleasure.    
  
“Guess you were right.” He says, very calmly, despite the heaving chest that Gabe can clearly see, and how his eyes are wild with excitement, like he’d love nothing more than to keep going. “You ought to be damn glad I’m feeling merciful right now, ‘cause if I see you causing trouble again, I won’t hesitate.”    
  
Gabe can’t look the man in the eyes any longer --too angry. Too helpless, feeling the collective gaze of the room upon him and knowing they are all as useless and afraid as he is. Despite himself, he nods, wondering for just a second if the kid in the bed if worth any of this. If it’s worth dying over.    
  
Hell, it’s not like he has anything else left to do. So he sucks it up, and nods, swallowing.    
  
It earns him a vicious backhand that nearly gets the better of his resolve. “I just want to be crystal-clear.” He’s told, as the man gestures with a nasty finger to the empty space of the corridor beyond. “If the kid wants to eat, he can walk himself down here.” The hand drops back to the man’s side, close enough to Gabe that he braces himself, again. “Understand me?”    
  
Gabe doesn’t hesitate. His tongue snaps back into is skull when the word tries to get itself out, but he forces it out as meekly as he can manage. God knows if he could swallow whatever those shots contained, he can swallow his own pride. “Yes.” He gets out, eventually.    
  
Another slap, this time with the clean flat of the man’s palm. “Yes, what?”    
  
It takes all that Gabe has not to spit in the guy’s eyes, truth be told. What keeps him from it is the memory of the kid’s fingertip on the back of his neck --the last bit of fight and desperation he could muster. And if the kid can manage that, in his state Gabe can sure as hell handle this.    
  
“Yes, sir.” He says, biting hard on the tenderest part of his tongue so that nothing else gets out. Nothing does. Maybe he just doesn’t have it in him.    
  
There’s no more malice to endure, then. The man staring down at him smiles, practically sweetly, and says, “Get the fuck out of my sight.”    
  
His legs are so weak beneath him when he tries to stand. The wall holds most of his weight as he steadies himself. God, Gabe thought they were supposed to be making him more resilient, or something --but he feels more pathetic than ever, beaten like an animal, trembling on both legs. But he doesn’t have time to tremble, or suffer.    
  
He doesn’t have time to stumble on the stairs as a few passers-by, done with their breakfast, stare on silently and pass him. He claws his way back up to standing. He spits blood. He carries on.    
  
He knows, already, that the pain he’s feeling know comes nowhere close to the failure of coming back to a room bereft of life. To find a body in the sheets that had been waiting on him --whose suffering was supposed to be alleviated. For Jack to be the last in a line of men who have died in that bed would far worse than this.    
  
He knows it as he comes upon the door breathlessly, holding himself up with a hand on the frame, unable to look right away. It’s not as if sight makes any of the difference. The kid’s body looks like all the others had, at the end of it. There’s no innate sparkle or beauty that signifies life. No, all that’s there for the living is the ugliness of it --the blood in the sheets. The sweat that sticks calico to corpse.    
  
Gabe knows, even before he can stand to look, that he knows the outcome of the story. Set in motion the moment he was told ‘the kid can walk himself down here’.    
  
He’ll carry the kid’s body down there for them all to see.    
  
It’s just; a corpse is so much heavier.    
  
The thought horrifies him so much that he has to look. He has to know, and gets no word of guidance either way from the way the body is twisted in the sheets, face-down and nameless, unmoving and eerily quiet. Gabe staggers towards him, with nothing left, his hand coming out first to grasp at whatever point of contact he finds first. The shoulder.    
  
“Kid.” He grunts, utterly out of breath. He barely has it in him to roll the body onto it’s back, gazing at the still, statuesque features that lay at rest there. It haunts him so much that Gabe’s grip tightens, and he shakes harder, his jaw set hard. “Hey, kid.”    
  
The kid’s eyes don’t open, not even slightly, and Gabe is so at a loss of what to do that he drops to his knees and leans across the cold, mottled skin of the body to press his ear to the kid’s chest. All he has to do is breathe. All his heart has to do is beat. God knows Gabe never asked him for anything else, and the initial silence is too awful to bear.    
  
But it’s there. Faint, crackling breaths under a slow, dwindling pulse that sounds so far away and empty, like a telltale heart under the floorboards of the building’s basement. It’s so pathetic and inspiring at all once, that this is the best the kid can do --so weak, life clinging to him like a terrible disease, and Gabe doesn’t think he’s ever seen anything more impressive.    
  
Swallowing once more, he leans down and takes one of the kid’s cold, limp wrists towards him, co-ordinating to prop the body to a sitting position. That takes most of his breath, and he barely gets to maneuvering his shoulder into the kid’s solar plexus before he’s winded again. But the cool of it --the inhuman sensation of hot skin on cold, cold nothingness spurs him to action, and with every bit of his defiance, he forces himself to stand.    
  
In his periphery, he sees the kid’s hands dangling, lifelessly. He starts walking.    
  
Gabe doesn’t remember feeling weaker in all of his life than he does, staggering with the body on his back. He nearly falls again on the stairs, leaning hard on the wall and feeling his last scrap of faith almost waver. What happens when he gets to the threshold of the cafeteria? He doesn’t have a plan, or even the strength to make it, he despairs. There’s no guarantee they won’t pry Jack’s body from his hands and continue their beating.    
  
Dread has all but taken him when he reaches the bottom of the stairs, turning out into the corridor that leads the cafeteria. Distantly, men are still sitting inside, and men are still on the door, and Gabe wants fall onto the floor and let the despair take him when he hears it.    
  
Two coughs, dry and weak, and he’s so taken by it that he hears himself say, “Jack?” Even if it feels far too familiar. Too intimate. For his part, the man on his body breathes a weak noise of discomfort, and while it helps gabe back to standing to hear, he has to wonder if he’s just bring the kid closer to the end with the trauma of wrenching him from bed.    
  
It’s too late to think like that, anyway. Worst comes to worse, at least it’s not another body in that bed.    
  
He still has nothing --no plan, and no strength left when he passes the line of the door. His footsteps aren’t loud over the quiet but present conversation, but he’s noticed by the eyes inside. The eyes of the men on the door are inward-focused, and it is perhaps the only mercy Gabe is given.    
  
For a second, he stops, knowing to himself that if they try to take the kid’s body, he’ll have no fight left to stop them. That’d be the worst thing, he thinks. After all this, if he’s earned anything, it’s the respect of seeing the kid’s last breaths, if he wants to or not.

 

Trembling, in the most measured way he can, he eases the body off of his shoulder, and hooks one of the kid’s cold arms tight over him. Gbe has to hold fast in a way that must be painful to the kid to afford him some semblance of standing. It’s a poor facsimile. The kid’s bare feet are limp and will drag on the surly floor. What he’s wearing is stained and reeks of piss and sweat.    
  
It’s not exactly a dignity, but it’s the most Gabe can afford him.    
  
The peace of the cafeteria is disturbed, not by one of the men on the door, but by the silence that the sight causes. Men that Gabe does not know look at him with something in their eyes --something he does not recognise. Not until the first one stands up out of his seat, in horror or respect or just plain confusion. The action in itself takes effect the same way a whisper tears through a crowd, and by the time Gabe is in sight of the men at the door, four men are standing.    
  
The silence is perhaps more haunting than the sight of it. It’s quiet enough, when he staggers inside with Jack upright next to him, that he can just about hear the ragged, feeble breaths that come up out of the kid.    
  
Nobody accosts him. Nothing happens, and in a moment of utter unreality, Gabe falters just before the first empty seat he can see. He goes down hard onto his knees for one more time, letting go of the kid only momentarily.    
  
The moment he’s free of the kid’s cold body, he feels a sort of panic stir in him. God, the kid just lies there, on the floor, within a few inches, and Gabe moves as fast as he can, in a terror that in the seconds they’re parted, Jack’s body will be taken from him. That here, at the last hurdle, it will all have been for nothing.    
  
So he goes desperately back towards the kid’s body, and gets a hand on him. He’s already pulling Jack back towards him when he realises that the kid’s are eyes open, slightly --barely there, probably not nearly enough to focus on much of anything, but they’re open.    
  
It should be a comfort, but a familiar fear shakes Gabe’s foundations enough that he knows it’s too dangerous to move the body much more. Instead, he crawls to the kid’s shoulder and pulls him so that he’s propped up against Gabe’s thighs.    
  
The table by his side is too high for him to look over, but he reaches up, looking over his shoulder for some kind of show of support or solidarity. The men standing look momentarily lost before Gabe hears his own voice, pathetic, but present, pull a command from the last part of him that has any real authority. “Food.” He coughs out. “I need--...”    
  
The first man approaches without any apprehension, despite it all, and makes use of himself by coming to Gabe’s side and putting a tray down, mostly empty, but with something on it, in the very least. They never look each other in the eye. Nothing is said about it --God, what would they even say?    
  
One look at the scene: of the kid on the floor, whittled to bone, almost at a final peace in Gabe’s lap, it seems to stir a kind of action. He hears the scrape of metal chairs on floors, but doesn’t look around, preoccupied suddenly with taking the spoon from the side of the tray and taking the softest food that’s left towards the kid’s mouth. It’s closed, mostly, and the kid can’t even open it himself. It’s Gabe who has to use his other hand to help him, and even then, there’s no immediate absolution. No action to indicate it’s working.    
  
God, he feels so helpless that he looks around, momentarily, for help, and sees a wall of legs that have now appeared around him. There must be eight or nine men, now, standing around the sight of it. More trays lay at rest on the floor, some fuller than others. The surprise purloins his attention, but only for a second. The moment he hears a vulnerable, barely-there noise of discomfort, he turns back to the kid’s body, and sees the face there set in a faint frown.    
  
But the kid’s mouth is moving. Gabe recognises the faint action and subsequent sound of swallowing. It’s --it’s working, he thinks.    
  
It breaks what’s left of his resolve, and Gabe coughs out another laugh, his face growing tight with a terrified smile to see it. Something tightens in his chest with an immense pressure like an avalanche, and he drops his head in some small kind of victory.    
  
He takes another spoonful of something else, and the kid seems to take it without much complaint, a little easier than the first.    
  
They’re there for what can only be twenty minutes or so. But they are some of the most surreal moments of Gabe’s life. He never gets to appreciate how it looks externally. The wall of men standing there, watching these strangers --witnessing the emaciated kid who has barely any hair left on his head or weight to his body or life within him, still on the floor, gray and unmoving, mostly.    
  
Gabe only knows what is before his sight. The twelve spoonfuls the kid takes before he turns away at the thirteenth, his head lolling back slightly in what might be an attempt to shake it. He only knows what he sees, which is the slightest visible portion of the kid’s eyes, staring vaguely up at him in the most terrifying way. That Jack’s mouth seems to make that word again --’thanks’, only this time, there’s some sound with it. But a whisper, and nothing more.    
  
The bell that signifies the end of breakfast comes only a few minutes after the kid seems to be done, and a few men seem to step forward as if offering to take the kid. Gabe is still weak as all hell, but never lets go of the body.  Jack’s weight has been on his back, in many ways, since he got here. It feels easy and familiar, now.    
  
He leaves the cafeteria in the safety of a group, surrounded by others. None of them say anything, still. Nor do they need to.    
  
There’s a victory in that quiet, but a fearfulness to it, too. Gabe feels it most when he is alone again, standing above Jack’s bed with the body still on his back. The bed is so marked with drying, brown blood that it might as well be the dark of a grave. He leans to it, but can’t seem to surrender Jack to it.    
  
So, instead, he lays the kid’s body down in his own bed, and leaves him be.    
  
There’s nothing more any of them can do for him, now.    
  
-   
  
In the morning light, he rises to find fresh, hot vomit on his pillow and sheets.    
  
He finds Jack’s body twisted tightly, tossing and turning intermittently. There’s an undeniably green look to the boy’s face --sweat thick on the kid’s face, and an occasional, pained murmurs to those trembling, blue lips.    
  
All signs of pain and struggle --all signs of life. Misery prolonged, it seems.   
  
Gabe stands over the sleeping body, his shadow falling forward like a cloak of darkness on the boy. He wonders if Jack even knows he’s there --if he knows anything at all of these past few days. And he should ask, he knows. Should test the kid’s consciousness, but instead, when it comes to it, all Gabe has the nerve to do is nudge the bed with the toe of his shoe.    
  
“Get up.” He says, stiffly, with no real authority in his tone.    
  
The body stills a little, but he can see Jack open his eyes. It’s after a few sluggish blinks and that greenish face turns to a gentle frown. Gabe feels himself draw back at it, ever-so-slightly, the fragility of it turning his stomach more than the smell of death ever could.    
  
He watches Jack swallow, pathetically, those yellowed eyes winding in their purple sockets to try to find him. He watches those blue lips make a letter --a single letter: ‘w’. And then a word; audibly, presently. ‘Water’.    
  
Gabe thinks he has done this before --been in this room, in his own skin just like this, but the deja vu never comes. All he can see are the differences. The way he turns in a different direction with the filled cup, away from the kid’s stained sheets. The way, when he approaches, Jack stares at him, limp in the sheets, his mouth still hanging open slightly, bile smeared across his face.    
  
How a trembling hand lifts itself from the sheets, weightless and dangling, reaching out this time.    
  
The kid still needs help to drink. A good portion of the water washes into the sheets and onto skin, but this time, Jack frowns when he drinks --he coughs when he takes too much. At Gabe’s withdrawal, he remains with his eyes open, staring ahead blandly for a few seconds.    
  
He’s sick, again, but Gabe witnesses the kid drag his own feeble body closer to the edge of the bed to vomit mostly on the floor. Some of it still catches the sheets --bile, by the largest degree. There can’t be anything left in the kid to throw up.    
  
Stranger, still is when the now much more violently shaking body pulls itself back into the sheets, and he hears Jack murmur, “M’feeling much better now.” It’s murmured. Gabe isn’t sure if it’s for his sake, but feels the benefit for it, nonetheless.    
  
He stands to leave the room, but only makes it three paces before the body twists itself slightly in the sheets, and he hears the kid talk again, in that same airy, delirious voice, like he’s whispering to himself. “Reyes--”   
  
That stops him dead like a bullet in the back. He doesn’t look --not right away. He’s relieved not to when the kid speaks again, sounding suddenly pained. “Am I --dying?”    
  
Of all things, Gabe hears himself laugh. Not loudly, but it escapes from him before he can get the better of himself. He turns, then, to look at the harrowed, pale kid who is still fresh with exhaustion from clawing out of the grave, and he sighs.    
  
He knows, now, with some kind of certainty, that if he leaves Jack there, in the bed, he’ll probably claw his way out of there, eventually.    
  
But, damn it all, he’s walking back over to the bed before he can get the better of that, too.    
  
He towers over the bed, and the boy, and in his weakness and delirium, shrinks away, almost afraid, the question still present in the anxious twist of the body. “R-Reyes--”   
  
“Quiet.” Gabe’s hands tense and unfurl as he thinks about the best way to maneuver the body. “Can you stand?”    
  
Still trembling, Jack looks at him, but never quite meets his eyes. His eyes look pained, and his head is shaking. Even if the green look of the kid, and his yellow eyes and bile-covered face are signs of recovery, Gabe still can’t stand to look at them, and so he leans forward to turn Jack onto his side. He doesn’t know where to start first in fixing it.    
  
A whimper halts him, but only for a second. He’s dragging the kid to the edge of the bed as he hears him cry out, raggedly, “Reyes --please, I can’t--...”   
  
Gabe winces. “Quiet!” He says, again, harder, as he draws back. The kid seems to take it as a sympathy, his eyes bright with fear but still bleary, his chest heaving already, somehow. It’s no sympathy at all. Free, now, Gabe tugs the sheets from the boy and away, so that he has nothing to shield him from the sterile air.    
  
Jack whimpers anew, then, a trembling arm drawing the body it belongs to in so that the kid is even smaller, somehow. It takes all of Gabe fetching his washcloth from the bathroom for the kid to be shaking in earnest. Shivering. It seems almost cruel, suddenly, to do the kid the favour of cleaning him up, but luckily for both of them, Gabe has never had too many reservations about cruelty.    
  
In a second, he has on knee on the mattress pad, and Jack’s cold, green face in one hand as the other brings the cloth to it. There’s no resistance left in the kid. Discomfort cuts deep into his features, but that’s the only difficulty. The shivering is easy to ignore --even if it gets worse when the cold water of the cloth moves from Jack’s face to his neck.    
  
Overstimulated, wounded like a shot horse, Jack twists in his grip and coughs out, pathetically. “D-don’t--” He whimpers, sharply, his eyes shut tight. God, at least he’s lucid.    
  
The kid’s face is easy enough to clean, even if it does nothing to fix the hollow, tired look that looks carved in. It takes only a few seconds, and when Gabe lets him go, Jack is lax and breathless against the mattress, relieved for the end of the onslaught, still shivering.    
  
His breath hitches when Gabe grabs for him again, one hand curling his torso to sitting, and the other going to pull up the shirt that he thought Jack would die in. It was grey, once, a regulation blend that’s now colourful with misery --piss and blood and sweat and bile, and it feels heavy and hot when Gabe tugs, struggling to get it over the kid’s head.   
  
Jack, for his part, continues to cough out, unfit to struggle, helpless to it. He hisses at the cool water on his skin and turns away from the touch, but Gabe can quell the resistance and hold the kid down with just the tips of his fingers. Even when the kid’s head shakes, and he coughs up more bile, and some blood, Gabe just snaps his fingers in front of the kid’s eyes, and asks, “Are you still with me?”    
  
When Jack swallows, his eyes still fearful and angry, but hazy and focusing on Gabe’s whole rather than his eyes --they both have their answer.    
  
He leaves the kid with that look in his eyes to wet the cloth again, bringing with him one of the odourless regulation squares of soap with him. Jack’s shaking body has turned away in the second he’s been gone, and when his shadow falls over the kid again, he turns harder.    
  
Not that there’s any use in it. Gabe forces him lovelessly into sitting again, leaning Jack over his shoulder slightly as he wipes down the kid’s spine. The skin there is rough with a few nasty-looking bedsores, and he already knows how painful the process is going to be as he lathers the soap into the rag.    
  
He clamps one hand down on the back oh the kid’s neck, pinning the body against his, before he drags the cloth over the wound.    
  
And Jack  _ wails _ .    
  
With what little resistance he has left to offer, Gabe feels the kid’s body fight his grip and he feels blunted, angry nails at the hand keeping Jack trapped, but he doesn’t relent. He tries to be as merciful as he can be, wiping in hard, efficient strokes until the kid’s back is slick with water, and nothing more, before easing him down onto his back.    
  
Jack is too out of it to notice. He shifts on his back, away from the tenderest parts, his face fixed in anguish and red, now, with angry lines of tears that have probably been wrenched unknowingly from his closed eyes. He doesn’t look when Gabe wipes down his chest, either, the fight in him seeming to give way.    
  
The kid’s eyes open again when Gabe takes one of his wrists and strokes the length of Jack’s arm with the cloth and under it. He’d think nothing of it, were it not for the face that Jack seems to look at him right as his grip tightens, and he experiences the gaze and the sensation of a heartbeat all at once. It’s uncomfortable --and intimate, too. When Gabe moves to the next arm, he holds the kid much looser, and doesn’t look up.    
  
“Reyes--...”    
  
Jack doesn’t speak. The word is on the end of a tremulous breath and it feels too intimate to hear. How can Gabe look at the kid now? He feels eyes on him, the weight of a gaze, and is paralysed as he sits, staring at the sheets before him. It’s too much to be sitting there, and it becomes worse when one of those grey, quivering arms moves in the sheets to rest by one of his thighs. Even through the fabric of what he’s wearing, he can feel the water on the kid’s skin, and the unshakeable cold. It frightens him.    
  
Gabe tries to swallow. His throat feels like the head of a pin. He doesn’t want to speak. He doesn’t want to be here in this room, anymore.    
  
Jack tries again. He coughs out, “R-re--”   
  
It pulls a string in Gabe he didn’t know he had. One he thought he lost years ago, and suddenly, he feels the overwhelming urge to cry. To let it get to him, and the twist in his gut is so convulsive and awful that he hears himself say, “It’s --it’s alright.”    
  
He can’t help but look at the kind, then, when he says it, if only to make the lie more sincere. And that should make it all the worse; it should pull at his insides enough to break his final piece of resolve, but it doesn’t. Of all things, Gabe looks at him and knows that the worst thing he can do to the kid --worse than leaving him in the other bed to die early would be to break, now. To give in to it.    
  
So he nods, to himself, and says again, “You’re okay.”    
  
Jack is mercifully quiet to let Gabe finish with him, wiping down his skin, purging the threat of the last few days. It’s biblical, he thinks, washing the kid’s feet like this, laying him down on clean calico to let him be. The image haunts him for some reason. All he can think of is the little tag they’d have tied around the kid’s toe when he was finally gone like labelling a specimen, and that would have been it.    
  
The whole experience is so bizarre that Gabe isn’t even sure if he’s real when he rises. He takes two towels from the closet at the end of the room, throwing one over his shoulder, and the other at the foot of his bed, where Jack now resides, eyes-open, taking heavy breaths.    
  
It occurs to him to say something, before he leaves the room. But he doesn’t.    
  
Instead, on the floor at this great divide, he cries in the bathroom.    
  
-   
  
Gabe doesn’t even think about the others until he comes upon the room next.    
  
Having shouldered this alone so far, he doesn’t know what to think when he sees a stranger coming down the hall, having emerged from his door.    
  
And then he knows what to think, and he’s heavy and sick with dread until he gets inside, breathless, worried, to find things as they were. Or --nearly.    
  
He’s faced with the kid’s back, but life is clear immediately from the shivering he can see. There are blankets over him --newer, clean, a thick sheet of them thrown over the kid in differing levels of grey and white and Gabe realises that they’ve been bought here. Given --the sheets and linens off of the regulation beds, and there must be seven or so covering Jack’s still-shaking body.    
  
He steps into the room, leaning hard on the door as relief takes him. The noise of it gives him away.    
  
With near-hysterical strength, given how he looks, Jack turns in his sheets, trying to find the intruder, and looking up at Gabe helplessly. He looks better --terrible, still, but enough that Gabe doesn’t feel cruel to witness him being.    
  
“T-they bought--” The kid isn’t so strong with his words. He tapers off into a hard shiver.    
  
Gabe doesn’t force anything more out of him. “Looks like somebody’s popular.” He says, awkwardly, keeping his fists in his pockets. He feels to brusque to be around the fragility of the scene. As if he’s hurting Jack by being in the room with him. The reality seems very much the opposite, and mid-shiver, it looks like the kid is trying to laugh.    
  
Of all things, to laugh. At a time like this. It’s so hysterical that Gabe has to laugh a little himself, or else he thinks he’d lose it.    
  
He crosses the room to sit on what was Jack’s bed, as it lies, stripped of it’s dirty sheets and just a plain, inoffensive mattress and bare pillows. The room’s air feels clearer, somehow, already. It’ll be lights-out, soon, and Gabe is taking off his shoes, feeling tired for the first time in a long time with relief. He thinks he’s ready to get some rest.    
  
He’s just getting to lying down when Jack speaks, again, clearer than before. “Reyes?” The kid’s voice still tugs at that somewhere in him. Gabe stares at the wall ahead of him and lets out a tight breath. When he feels steady, he looks over at the kid. “Could I --some water?”    
  
Gabe nods to save for speaking, and rises attentively to it. He’s filling the cup in the bathroom when the lights die, and in the darkness, he re-emerges into the room, still adjusting. Somehow, even blind as he is, he knows exactly where Jack is.    
  
He goes softly over to the bed --softly enough that his feet make no din as he places the cup on the floor. “It’s here,” He murmurs.    
  
As he does, the sound of the sheets alert him. Jack whispers, “Thank you.” And Gabe thinks that at this point, it probably goes without saying. He goes to withdraw, but is halted. “Reyes?” Jack is still murmuring. He wishes that the kid would call him anything else. “I can’t --can’t get warm.”    
  
Still crouched, slightly, in the darkness, Gabe’s can see all of the room bathed in a purple sort of darkness. He can see the bare mattress, and he turns away from it, instinctively. Swallowing, he looks at a the top-most sheet of fabric on the boy that’s wrapped loosely, thin enough to see through in the light.    
  
“What do you..?” Gabe looks about the room again for some kind of clue, but comes up empty-handed, and feels all the worse for it when Jack coughs again.    
  
“M’so --so  _ cold _ .” It sounds so desperate, punctuated by the rattle of teeth. Gabe knows he’s done enough already, and to even hear the kid talking is a victory. But the universe is always quick to get even, and he fears the cosmic irony of Jack pershing now, leaving all of this for nothing. Gabe’s never been much for irony.    
  
“Alright.” He says, almost automatically, even though he has no idea of what to do to help the kid. He looks back at the other bed for some kind of indication, and when none occurs, he nods to himself. “I’m gonna--” Swallowing, again, he coughs. “You need to move.”    
  
It’s a short blessing that Jack doesn’t really argue. He seems to understand Gabe immediately, and drags his own body over to the far edge of the bed. Gabe hesitates before he sets a knee on the mattress, and thinks of all the times he’s been in bed with men, and how familiar but bizarre it all is.    
  
The bed is cooling, and when he finds Jack in the mess of sheets, his body is even colder. It’s startling to the touch, but Gabe does his best to remain neutral as he pulls the kid’s back into his chest. However strange it is, it’s working, and Jack makes this noise of relief, one of his hands coming up to pull Gabe even closer to him.    
  
It’s another blessing in itself that the kid doesn’t say anything. Gabe’s not so sure he could handle it. He lies awake in the dark silence and waits for Jack to sleep. It’s unclear when he does go, but it happens, and then Gabe is alone in the dark, feeling somehow at peace. He thinks of all the time he has laid there, looking at the kid from a distance, trying to count the breaths like others were busy counting sheep.    
  
Now, he can feel the rise and fall of Jack’s chest, and the way he twists in his sleep, turning onto his other side at one point, so that he’s actually curled into Gabe. He feels warmer. He feels human, actually, and Gabe feels himself smile in the dark, where he knows nobody is there to see it.    
  
Hell, he thinks, exhausted himself, the kid is probably too delirious to ever remember this.    
  
-   
  
Gabe wakes before morning light.    
  
He finds himself in the bed, and is disorientated, at first. He feels hot and uncomfortable, and sees the reason immediately. Buried in the avalanche of blankets, pink in the face and leaning heavy on one of Gabe’s arm, Jack is twitching very faintly. Must be that he’s dreaming. His ankles are making very small, circular motions, and Gabe wonders if he’s running somewhere, in his sleep.    
  
A tentative hand on Jack’s brow finds no signs of cold, but instead hot, and sticky with sweat. Not the feverish kind; it’s too thin in substance. At the touch, Jack seems to frown, and Gabe is so affronted by the idea of the kid waking like this that he gets out of the bed on shaking legs, standing in the dark room.    
  
He gets about three seconds of peace before the lights come on, like fire to the sun. He blinks hard and looks down at the floor to let his eyes adjust, and gets no real moment of peace before he hears a few rattling coughs from the bed with the telltale swish of sheets.    
  
Gabe feels so suddenly embarrassed by where he found himself that he ducks into the adjoining bathroom. He goes to the basin and wakes himself up with the sting of cold water, trying to hide his strange humiliation. Of course, he can’t hide in there forever, nor pray that Jack falls back to sleep when the bell for breakfast sounds.    
  
Instead, he has to face the situation, so he rights himself quickly and comes back into the room. There’s no reprisal or explanation about the night, but instead, the kid, all tangled in the sheets, reaching out uselessly for the cup of water Gabe had left for him on the floor. Jack never has to say anything --Gabe hands him the cup without fanfare, and turns away to get dressed.    
  
As he’s pulling a shirt over his head, he hears Jack behind him, sounding more sure of himself. “Reyes--”    
  
Gabe sighs. He tugs on the hem of the shirt, struggling, “It’s Gabriel.” He says, plainly, turning towards the bed.    
  
Jack yawns, frowning. “It’s --what?”    
  
“Nothing.” Gabe shakes his head. “Nevermind.” He’s not sure how much it matters to him. The kid has plenty of time to learn it, anyway. “What is it?”   
  
Jack’s face is still coloured with a slight blush, and he squirms like the sheets are hot and cumbersome. “Do we have any --any food?”    
  
Gabe looks at him, squarely. He tries not to see the irony in it. “It’s breakfast.” He says. “Are you coming?”    
  
Jack’s eyes --open and rested, follow his back to the door and he swallows, pale and trembling. “I--”He tries to lift himself off of the bed but fails, ending up out of breath and face-down in the sheets. The kid rears his head and whispers, breathlessly. “I don’t think I can walk.”    
  
Gabe wonders, briefly, if the kid has any memory at all of Gabe carrying him on his goddamn back. If he has any idea at all of how much Gabe has done to keep the kid alive --not just fed and watered but alive. Jack’s eyes look vacant with innocence, ashamed at his own weakness, and Gabe realises that he doesn’t. Not a bit.    
  
And he’s never been more relieved.    
  
He walks up to the bed as Jack’s struggling to lean up on his elbows, flustering himself, and holds up the flat of his palm. “Easy.” He says, gruffly, and takes Jack by the top of his arm to drag him into sitting, The kid makes a sharp noise of pain and coughs out. His skin is burning and hot with sweat, a stark contrast to the night, and Gabe realises he must be feverish.    
  
He eases up on Jack, and the kid all but falls back down, groaning out again. Gabe can’t think to find it anything but comforting. He unfurls a few layers of blankets, finding them warm and moist, too, before hooking one of the kid’s arms around his shoulder, and standing, bringing them both up.    
  
Jack makes a noise of discomfort again and his other arm comes up to his head to trace his brow. It takes something out of him, that much is clear, and Gabe is so preoccupied with dragging him towards the door that he doesn’t notice, at first, when the last few bedsheets clinging to the kid are cast off to the floor.    
  
It isn’t until Jack murmurs, “Reyes,” Right in his damn ear, spooking the hell out of him, that he realises the kid isn’t wearing anything. Gabe takes a look down and then quickly back up. Nudity isn’t novel to him --he’s been serving for years, at this point, but to see it on Jack is strange. It’s as if the kid isn’t even human to him, but a concept. For every sad glance he was given in the cafeteria and every bruise he fostered for the stranger. Jack isn’t a person to him as much as he is a mascot.    
  
So he takes his concept back into the room and lays him on the bare mattress, going into the closet in the far room and grabbing spare uniforms in regulation grey. He supposes the act of dressing Jack would be awkward, but the kid doesn’t exactly look like he knows what’s going on, limp against the mattress and burning up. In fact, it’s almost easy.    
  
He’s trying to get a shirt over the kid’s head when Jack tries to rear back, pathetically, moaning out, “No, it’s --it’s too hot.”    
  
Gabe doesn’t listen to him. He pulls it over roughly to try and spare them both the task of dragging it out. It’s not like Jack is the only one who wants to eat, either. He loops Jack’s arm over his shoulder and stands again, feeling the kid exhale shakily, his feet unmoving against the ground. The clothes hang from his body like sheets in the wind.    
  
Jack isn’t heavy. Or maybe it’s that Gabe has just gotten stronger, his wounds less fresh. It’s far less trouble to carry him, like this, which surprises him when, as they pass a stranger in the hall, he’s asked, “Is he--”   
  
Gabe draws Jack’s body in. “He’s fine.” He says. The pity comes a bit too late for him; not just for his own pride, but for something strange and new that grips him --something like an instinct. God, when is a person not a person?    
  
Still, he’s asked, “Are you sure you don’t want--”   
  
“I’ve got him.”    
  
Jack is practically unresponsive on his shoulder by the time they reach the cafeteria. Gabe has a moment, initially, looking around the place lost, unsure of what to do with the kid. He knows he should give him a seat or something, the exertion already taking it’s toll on Jack: visibly. The pink in the kid’s face is dissipating to a pallor, and as much as Gabe should give him a break, he can’t stand the thought of letting the kid go.    
  
It doesn’t end up being a problem. The kid’s presence is like a lightning rod, and the moment people seem to recognise him, the crowd parts, and help comes. It’s like some deus ex machina, and instead of counting absentees in morning, the veil of hopelessness is so suddenly pierced by something new, and strange, and fickle.    
  
They’ve lost so many --too many to even begin to speak of. And of all people, there Jack is, drowning in his clothes, barely holding himself to sitting. The only proof they have of life after.    
  
Nobody does speak of it, in the end. Gabe thinks that it’s enough to witness it. The kid has no idea of the effect he has on the other men, he’s so out of it. Gabe still isn’t much for irony, but even he can see the joke in it, that the modest, sorry-looking kid is the one hope they have to cling to, the only one to overcome the last and most irresistible enemy of humanity: death.    
  
Hell, what does the kid care? Jack eats as much as he can handle, and then goes lax against Gabe’s shoulder. It fosters a little concern, but Gabe waves them off easily.    
  
“He’s okay.” He says, certainly.    
  
Jack throws up on the way to the room, but it’s minimal, and when Gabe surrenders him to the sheets for one last time, he’s still sort of alert. He’s looking up at Gabe with those strange, blue eyes, and it occurs to him again --the last irony of all, that Jack is trying to memorise his face. The face of his last hope.    
  
-   
  
When the morning comes, on the eighth week, Gabe wakes to an empty bed.    
  
He opens his eyes in the new light of the room, and to his horror, he rises alone. The bed across from him is empty. Bereft of life.    
  
God knows Jack can’t walk. He can’t, and suddenly Gabe feels dread grow heavy in him. Did he slip away, in the night? Were all of Gabe’s ministrations the last straw, shaking the life from Jack’s vessel until he was too tired, too weary of life, succumbing in the night where nobody could save?    
  
It paralyses him. Gabe turns to stone in the sheets and stares at the way the bed looks, when it’s empty. He wonders if it’s cold. He wonders if Jack died just after the lights did, alone in his sheets, staring at Gabe’s sleeping form, unable to ask for help.    
  
The horror is only just being realised within him when he hears a scratching at the door, and he looks up.    
  
Leaning heavy on the door, white as a sheet, but there, Jack smiles very faintly.    
  
“It’s breakfast.” He says, in a small voice. His blue, blue eyes look sharper, and more focused, even if he is slumped hard on the wall. There are probably a few more days worth of recovery due for him, but he doesn’t look sorry for himself at all. No, instead, Jack is standing there, and actually smiling, and he says, “Are you coming?”    
  
Gabe doesn’t believe his eyes. He doesn’t believe in anything, but staring up at the kid in the door, he realises it. He believes in Jack Morrison.    
  
So he says, “Right behind you.” And rises. 


End file.
